Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 21, 2010

YouTube's HTML5 Player

Now that at least 3 important browsers support HTML5's video tag, YouTube added an experimental feature that lets you replace the Flash player with a native player. The main benefit is that your browser plays videos without using Adobe's Flash plug-in, which might slow down your computer and even crash your browser. Another benefit is that videos are treated like images and can be customized using standard CSS features.

For now, YouTube uses the h.264 video codec, so the only browsers that support YouTube's HTML5 player are Safari 4 and Google Chrome. Firefox only supports the Ogg Theora format, which is an open format.

"Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video," explains YouTube.

YouTube also updated the Flash player and made it easier to switch to a different version of the video.